I’ve spent so much time playing around in Facebook that I have neglected to stay present for my colleagues and associates on LinkedIn. I want to remedy that, particularly now that I am writing about resumes, job interviews, and other career related topics. Hence my question: can I post updates to LinkedIn that include embedded URLs to my blog articles?
I’m with you about LinkedIn, actually. I check Facebook and Google Plus every single day. I check Twitter every day or two. And LinkedIn? Well, since I’m not an active user seeking a job or an employee, I really don’t find myself on that site that frequently.
Still, in the last few years, there’s no question that LinkedIn has done a splendid job of continually updating the site and its capabilities so that it’s a fine professionally-oriented social network (unlike FB and G+, which are much more personal and social in my opinion). That’s terrific if you need to work in that space, and I’ve definitely had very good results posting things on LinkedIn, communicating with colleagues, etc.
One area where they’ve not only kept parity with Facebook but actually improved on the FB user interface is with status updates. You’ll see what I mean, but you can not only post status updates that include URLs or web page addresses, you can even tweak and tune them once posted.
Let’s have a look!
Here’s a typical LinkedIn status update box. Note the “Attach a link” button. Click on it and you can paste your Web page address (URL):
Notice here I’m also demonstrating that LinkedIn, like Facebook and Google Plus, gives you the ability to fine tune who gets to see a specific update by clicking on the “visible to” button on the bottom. I’ll stick with “anyone” (aka “public”) for this particular entry and click on “Attach” to have the URL scanned and enter more of the actual status update:
One click later and LinkedIn has scanned the page, figured out the title, the base domain (“dailycamera.com”), pulled out the first sentence or so and even found an image it can feature. All automatic. All very Facebook, right?
But there’s one thing here that no-one else has: The “Edit” button immediately after the text description. Click on it and…
Yup, as you can see, you can tweak the title it’s going to use for this piece, the excerpt of text it’s found and decide if you want to keep the photo or not.
To continue, I’m actually going to just ignore all of this – since it looks good – and focus my attention on the top box, the actual status update area:
It all looks good, right? To share it with everyone on LinkedIn, I click “Share” and here’s what’s produced in the news stream of everyone who is connected to me, along with anyone who sees updates available to “anyone”:
Nice, simple and surprisingly sophisticated. Hope it helps you out!